How does human powered search compare to hakia’s offering?
If your search paradigm entirely relies on human editing, like Wikia Search, then the question is how are you going to handle the cases of (1) the long-tail, and (2) dynamic content? For the long tail, there are not enough people on the planet to do this job manually, not even to make a small dent. For dynamic content, you need to have dedicated people watching and scanning every single new content to act upon immediately. Both cases are very shaky and unrealistic propositions, not to mention the vulnerability to abuse (the rat race of marketers.) As a result, human powered search is not an answer to the search fatigue problem (i.e., cases of 1 and 2 above), it will only be effective in the same popularity domain of the current players. At hakia, we believe in “guided” human contribution only as a supplementary part of a semantic search engine. Such examples will come on-line at hakia.com.
